Post Mortem on the Design Process

Now that the puzzle has been released I thought I would do a write up of some of my thought processes while designing it.
Be aware that this will have full mechanical spoilers! (and the solution)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

At first, all I had was the idea of reconstructing a map of some kind, inspired by the examples on the color palette page.
The initial idea was that the map had to be constructed following a set of rules.

However, I wanted to create a system where the rules of the system are not simply just basic adjacency or sudoku-like constraints, so the idea for the Artifact being movable and its placement affecting what part of the grid follows what rules was created. I also wanted to ensure that the individual rules for each light were relatively simple, while not all being like “this must connect to this” or “no duplicates in a row/column”. 
Therefore each rule in the final puzzle can be explained in less than 7 words, and only considers a single variable (be that count, adjacency, type, etc). This ruled out some more complicated rule ideas, such as sightlines being blocked by mountain tiles.

I also wanted to avoid any diagonal adjacency rules to avoid extra complications and make the rules easier to figure out.

Originally I wanted to have only a single solution (or at least very few), but couldn't work out a way to keep the rules simple enough while still forcing a set position. In hindsight maybe I could have done something with the 5th artifact rule that would make it more constrained.

The ruleset that I ended up on allowed more than one solution, and it wasn't too difficult to arrange the pieces once you had discovered how to make each part of the artifact light up. Hence the name of the final puzzle, Artifact of the Atlas, where Atlas refers to the fact there are multiple maps(solutions) that satisfy all of the Artifact’s rules.

However, this does mean it can be solved by accident if you are lucky, so to truly complete the puzzle you should understand all 5 rules of the Artifact.

(BTW If you can think of a way to constrain the solution while still keeping the simplicity of the individual rules I would be interested to know how)

Artifact Rules (rot13) / Solution: 
Rnpu ehyr nssrpgf n erpgnathyne ertvba onfrq ba gur ybpngvba bs gur negvsnpg.
Evtug : Ubhfrf zhfg or arkg gb n Sberfg
Qbja : Ahzore bs qrfreg zhfg or ynetrfg
Yrsg : Fnzr glcrf pnaabg or begubtbanyyl nqwnprag 
Gbc: Rdhny ahzore bs rnpu glcr
Pragre : Nyy 25 gvyrf zhfg or cynprq